1969 Ford Mustang SOHC - Match Racer

The “Ford Drag Team” lettering leaves no doubt as to the factory heritage of this ’69 Mustang. Yes, other Ford race cars had sponsorship and a factory lineage, including the famous “dollar cars.” The dollar price transferred ownership—and therefore liability of the racing activities—directly to the team operating outside Ford.

2/11Starting with stock Mustangs, Holman & Moody-Stroppe in Long Beach, California, built these drag cars for the Ford Drag Team.

In contrast, this Mustang was part of Ford’s Drag Team. There was no external team. The factory was the team, with racing and other activities administered by Car Corporation, a special operations division out of Livonia, Michigan, working directly for Ford Motor Company.

The heritage of the ’69 featured here becomes even more tantalizing considering Ford chose to power it with the illustrious 427 Cammer. Introduced in 1964, the SOHC (single overhead cam) big-block was essentially a hand-built racing motor never installed in a production car. Ford built this engine to go up against Chrysler’s 426 Hemi in stock car racing, but NASCAR banned Ford’s new 427 in 1965 due to the fact it was not homologated in a production car.

The 427 SOHC motor did find a niche in professional drag racing, where it earned a reputation in Top Fuel dragsters and numerous Funny Cars.

Ford was selling Boss 429s and 428 Cobra Jets in 1969 and 1970. The Cammer era wasn’t fully over in racing. Cammers had gained an elite reputation in extremely exotic racing machinery, such as Connie Kalitta’s Bounty Hunter and Dyno Don Nicholson’s nitro-burning Funny Cars. The sight of a Cammer engine really excited crowds at the big drag races in the ’60s. No doubt, Ford capitalized on the Cammer’s killer drag racing image in this ’69 Mustang match racer. Only two were built.

Ford restoration guru Bob Perkins drifted back to the 1980s to tell us how he acquired this historic Mustang. Jacky Jones, the famous Ford and Mustang collector and Ford dealer in Georgia, “found out about this car” through one of his drivers.

“Bob Oswald drove one of the Ford transporter haulers that delivered new cars to Jacky’s dealership,” Perkins said.

6/11Hubert Platt and Randy Payne drove the Ford Drag Team cars for the Eastern Team. During the week, the teams headquartered at Ford dealerships, where they held seminars and helped set up Ford drag clubs. On the weekends, they traveled to dragstrips to race. They used a special Ford car hauler with a cab-over design made from a Ford C800.

Perkins and Jones are good friends and often traded vintage Mustangs as they built their collections. Perkins found and sold to Jones Hubert Platt’s ’69 Super Stock Ford Drag team car. What Jones had run across, and was able to purchase and trade to Perkins, was the old Hubert Platt Ford East Coast Drag Team Mustang for 1969 and 1970.

The East Coast Team, running blue cars with white stripes, consisted of a ’69 Mustang match racer with a 427 SOHC V-8, a ’69 428 Cobra Jet for Super Stock (the aforementioned car now in Jones’ collection), and a Torino with a 428 Cobra Jet engine, also for Super Stock. Platt, who was the captain of this team, drove both Mustangs. Randy Payne drove the Torino.

Platt sold the Cammer to Sutton, who drag-raced the car with a 428 Cobra Jet. Then he let it sit outside his shop. Through Jones, Perkins became the third owner.

The old Mustang was “pretty complete,” Perkins said. The body was clean and rust-free, and he had most of the trick pieces, such as the fiberglass doors, fenders, decklid, and hood, mounting an oversized Boss 429-style scoop. His shop spent “a lot of time getting that fiberglass straight.” The old drag car also had many “extra holes drilled for fuel pumps etc.,” and as a result his shop had to weld up these holes.

Inside, the old Mustang had lightweight aluminum door panels and pull straps for the Lexan side windows, very similar to a ’65 Shelby G.T. 350 Competition Mustang fastback. The three-point rollbar was also intact, as were the Stewart-Warner oil pressure and water temperature gauges in the center of the dash, and the 9,000-rpm Auto Meter tachometer on top of the dash, just to the right of the steering wheel.

The driver’s seat is a curiosity. Holman & Moody-Stroppe built these cars. However, once the drivers got them, they made changes. Platt transferred his “favorite seat,” including the seat tracks, from his long-nose ’65 Mustang drag racer. When he sold the ’69 Cammer, he again kept this seat for his next drag car, a Maverick. Sutton retrieved the original seat after he sold the ’69 match racer to Jones. Perkins subsequently bought the seat from Sutton and installed it in this car.

10/11The interior came with Hubert Platt’s favorite seat from his previous race Mustang. The Stewart-Warner water temperature and oil pressure gauges were installed by Holman & Moody-Stroppe, as was the original Auto Meter tachometer, which reads to 9,000 rpm with a variable pointer for redline.

Parts of the Cammer motor were still there (one of many Platt used, no doubt). The irreplaceable piece was the experimental Ford intake, a must-have for an accurate restoration. Platt had sold this intake to racer buddy Ed Skelton in South Carolina.

Perkins lucked out getting back this historic intake from well-known racing parts dealer Jay Cushman, who had purchased “all of Ed Skelton’s stuff.”

Perkins said, “I got the intake from Cushman in 1990. When he found out I had the car, he brought it to the indoor swap meet in Columbus, Ohio.”

Over the years, Bob Perkins turned down many offers to buy this intake.

“That’s the only one ever made like that. You just can’t find a factory tunnel ram for a Cammer motor. That’s a factory Ford XE experimental tunnel ram intake.”

Perkins installed the intake and has restored Platt’s old match racer to the way it was in 1969.

1969 and 1970 were glory days for drag racing

Running low 10s at 135 mph, Platt’s ’69 match racer became very popular at the dragstrip, especially in the South. During the week, Car Corporation scheduled the Drag Team cars to travel to dealerships around the country for seminars that included the drag racers. The Mustangs arrived on special cab-over ramp trucks, painted in the same color schemes as the drag cars.

The years 1969 and 1970 were glory days for drag racing. The baby boom generation was in its prime youth years. Platt would show up and race fan favorites like Grumpy Jenkins or Sox and Martin and pack the stands with screaming teenagers eager to watch a best-of-three match race.

Ford was still funding its Drag Team for 1970. There was no need to start over with a ’70 Mustang. Instead, Ford merely updated the ’69 to look like a ’70 model with new fenders and two headlights instead of four in the grille.

The 1969 match racers became so popular, the NHRA created a new Pro Stock classification for them in 1970. Buster Couch, of the NHRA in the Atlanta area, gave his friend Hubert Platt the first number, No. 201 in this brand-new Pro Stock class.

In fact, the 1970 NHRA rulebook actually pictures this very car for the Pro Stock class. The photo is of the car rigged as a ’69 model, or exactly as Perkins restored Platt’s Mustang.

11/11Bob Perkins could have restored his historic factory Ford Drag Team Mustang as a ’69 match racer or a ’70 Pro Stock. “I got both sets of fiberglass fenders with the car,” he said. He favored restoring the car as it raced in 1969 as a match racer resembling a Boss 429.